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<H1><A NAME="answer">
<img src="../gx/dennis/qbubble.gif" alt="(?)"
border="0" align="middle">
<font color="#B03060">The Answer Gang</font>
<img src="../gx/dennis/bbubble.gif" alt="(!)"
border="0" align="middle">
</A></H1>
<BR>
<H4>By Jim Dennis, Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder, Breen, Chris, and the Gang,
the Editors of Linux Gazette...
and You!
<br>Send questions (or interesting answers) to
<a href="mailto:linux-questions-only@ssc.com">linux-questions-only@ssc.com</a>
</H4>
<p><em><font color="#990000">There is no guarantee that your questions
here will <b>ever</b> be answered. You can be published anonymously
- just let us know!
</font></em></p>
</center>
<p><hr><p>
<!-- endcut ======================================================= -->
<H3>Contents:</H3>
<dl>
<dt><a href="#tag/greeting"
><strong>&para;: Greetings From Heather Stern</strong></A></dl>
<DL>
<!-- index_text begins -->
<dt><A HREF="tag/1.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>help installing telnetd</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/2.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>touch files recursively linux mandrake 7.2</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/3.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>Winprinters</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/4.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
></a>your mail --or--
<dd><A HREF="tag/4.html"
><strong>Search and Replace Without Breaking Permissions</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/5.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
></a>your mail --or--
<dd><A HREF="tag/5.html"
><strong>Kernel Panic after putting disk back</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/6.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>Procmail and regular expressions....(Snowwhite...)</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/7.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
></a>Need to milk you again --or--
<dd><A HREF="tag/7.html"
><strong>Timely Samba Release?</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/8.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>3d linux</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/9.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>linux vectoring synergy</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/10.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>Why linux for routing</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/11.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>disappearing act</strong></a>
<dt><A HREF="tag/12.html"
><img src="../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" height="28" width="50"
alt="(?)" border="0"
><strong>getting 2 dynamic ip addresses</strong></a>
<!-- index_text ends -->
</DL>
<!-- .~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~.~~. -->
<A NAME="tag/greeting"><HR WIDTH="75%" ALIGN="center"></A>
<H3 align="left"><img src="../gx/dennis/hbubble.gif"
height="50" width="60" alt="(&para;) " border="0"
>Greetings from Heather Stern</H3>
<!-- begin hgreeting -->
<p>Once again, welcome to the wonderful world of The Answer Gang. The peeve
of the month this time is a tie:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>AOL users asking for help regarding things which clearly would
not be answered by AOL's tollfree tech support by anything but closing the
offending account.</strong>
<br>&nbsp;
<br>Folks, AOL doesn't <em>have</em> a Linux version, not even for SVGAlib.
The closest we can get are a zillion instant messanger clients,
including Netscape, for which the universal trick is "tell it who you
are on AOL, then start IM'ing your friends." If you can't figure
out who you are on AOL, we certainly don't know! So, we can't answer
any AOL questions at all. Even ethical ones.
<br>&nbsp;
<li><strong>Business people who want us to do <em>their</em> homework -
asking very complicated questions clearly worth a certain amount of
consulting time, frosted with an automatically tacked on "This message
is confidential and may not be given to anyone but the intended recipient,
legal mumbo jumbo, etc. etc." message which they may not even be aware of,
and possible cherry on top "Please hurry."</strong>
<br>&nbsp;
<br>Understand we're not really peeved at the person who's asking, so much
as the presumption. <em>Linux Gazette</em> is for everyone ... to
Linux just a little more fun ... and if we don't get to (potentially)
give your answer to the masses, too, then <em>LG</em> isn't getting
"paid" to pass your question along to us.
<br>&nbsp;
<br>If you're a corporate type with an outbound mail gateway that adds such
notes, and you're fairly sure your answer will be useful (maybe even fun)
for the rest of the <em>Linux Gazette</em> readership, then
<blockquote><em><font color="#FF0000">give us permission to
publish the thread, up front, when you ask the question.
</font></em></blockquote>
<br>&nbsp;
<br>Your company will still be anonymous. You can be anonymous too, if
you say so.
<br>&nbsp;
<br>As for "hurry" -- if you want a timely answer, or even to be sure of
getting one, pay a consultant.
(Cheap plug: some of the Gang happen to be consultants. But not
all of us.)
</ul>
<p>We could probably use a few more articles that appeal to corporate
users, though! Enough of that, though. Onward to something fun. The
fun I took on this month is to upgrade my system.</p>
<p>Oh boy.</p>
<p>Surely I mentioned that I've been on a continuous upgrade path of
<a href="http://www.suse.com/">SuSE</a> since early 5.1? No? Well,
okay, I admit, I did a "real" reinstall sometime around 6.1 or so,
and then have chugged along on security updates and adding RPMs from
the latest 6.x branch for a while. With an occasional graft from
Debian packages and source tarballs.</p>
<p>Like any normal user I also have lots of different things I do, so
my home directory's a bit messy, I have a few projects here and there,
and I haven't been real prissy about which account I use to download
general things like cartoons (Hi
<a href="http://www.shanecollinge.com/Linux">Shane</a>!)
or new kernel sources into. Usually I remember to move them to
someplace under /usr/src eventually.</p>
<p>As Piglet was fond of saying, "Whatta... whatta mess."</p>
<p>Surely it would have been easier for me if I hadn't decided to buy an
extra hard disk at the same time, discovered that my floppy bay stopped
working (p.s. can't boot from my CD. Something to do with it being a SCSI
device in an IDE system), and (eek!) was reminded that we'd like to get
the column fragments in early this month.</p>
<p>Of course, I was able to abuse about a CD's worth of free disk space to
cover for this. I made the extra hard disk a feature rather than more
trouble by installing the new setup solely to it.</p>
<p>The install went fine, but it wasn't completely smooth. Here's a few
hints if you're plotting an upgrade, and I promise, they don't depend on
you using SuSE:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Decide how much stuff you're going to put on there <em>before</em>
you lay out your partitions, so you have enough.</strong>
<br>I ended up experimenting with <tt>parted</tt> after I foolishly
made <tt>/usr</tt> a bit small (Hint: 2 Gb is <em>not</em> big enough.
What was I <em>thinking</em>? Oh yeah. My old drive didn't use Gnome and K
desktop. Now they're par for the course. Heh.) <tt>parted</tt> works
great so far, provided you've had prior training with the "Towers of
Hanoi" game first. It can resize partitions, and it can move them, but
it can't slide them forward. I had this great wooden Hanoi game when
I was a kid, and while I was juggling partitions I could almost hear the
wooden clicks and swaps in my head.
<br>&nbsp;
<li><strong>Check that you're going to be able to use the same account
numbers.</strong>
<br>This is more of a biggie if you're completely changing distros, but
it still applies. If you've created "system level" accounts for a
database or something, and it wasn't a package designed for your
distro, you may discover that something else expects to use that number
now. Whether you move your own, or decide to do something about the
interloper, things aren't going to work right until it's fixed.
<br>&nbsp;
<br>If you can't, and you're restoring accounts from a tarball, then
just make sure you have the user and group accounts you need
already assigned to their new numbers before you restore. Then
<tt>tar</tt> will deal with the number change for you.
<br>&nbsp;
<li><strong>While we're talking about version numbers, check that config files
haven't completely changed style during the upgrade.</strong>
<br>If they have, you probably cannot just drop the old ones back in
safely at all. In this category, I got off light... maybe because
I'd already gone and upgraded a few things on my own.
<br>&nbsp;
<li><strong>If it's in the retail channel, it's out of date -- get your security
patches.</strong>
<br>The new version of YaST makes this easier, but I also had a few things
of my own to add to the security plan.
</ul>
<p>Beyond these normal things, I really needed to get some of these projects
into directories of their own, so it's clear where I should put stuff for
those things from now on. Rather like ordering the teenager to clean up
their room...</p>
<p>Next thing I know the end of the month is approaching, and my dreams of
handling TAG at a dreamy summertime pace are dashed again
<IMG SRC="../gx/dennis/smily.gif" ALT=":)"
height="24" width="20" align="middle">
</p>
<p>I still think backups are your friend, but at least I didn't need 'em
this time. All I need is more RAM and I'm set! The weather is
improving and I'm having a great time. So here's those answers --
share and enjoy.</p>
<!-- end hgreeting -->
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<!-- *** BEGIN copyright *** -->
<H5 align="center">This page edited and maintained by the Editors
of <I>Linux Gazette</I>
<a href="http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html"
>Copyright &copy;</a> 2001
<BR>Published in issue 66 of <I>Linux Gazette</I> May 2001</H5>
<H6 ALIGN="center">HTML script maintained by
<A HREF="mailto:star@starshine.org">Heather Stern</a> of
Starshine Technical Services,
<A HREF="http://www.starshine.org/">http://www.starshine.org/</A>
</H6>
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